Page 49 of The Undead

Well, the milk was well and truly spilled. I stepped to the railing and looked down at her. No use trying to hide what I was now, not with Foster; I hoped my eyes were as red and hot as my anger.

“Let her go,” I ordered. Foster opened her hand, hardly even noticing that she did it, and Sylvia stumbled backward. “Now get out.”

Foster couldn’t seem to find anything to say. She backed up until she bumped into a wall, then slid against it until she hit an obstructing corner, I kept watching her.

“May God have mercy on you,” Foster finally whispered, and ran. I listened to the retreating echoes of her footsteps and the slam of the door, then looked down at Sylvia.

“You okay?”

She nodded, pushing her disarranged braid back with trembling fingers. Her eyes were half-closed and far away, and her heartbeat was too fast. I reached down and put my hand on her shoulder. The muscles jumped like live wires, and her skin felt hot and frighteningly fragile.

“She knows,” Sylvia said at last, and rubbed her palms nervously on the fabric of her blue jeans. “Now she knows about you, too.”

I didn’t say anything to that. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

When we went out to the car, Sylvia just looked at the fresh ragged scratches gouged in the paint of her hood and doors. There was an insane fury about them, a destructive frenzy all out of proportion to reality. I was prepared to drive, but she surprised me by unlocking her side and taking the wheel without a word. When I was inside, she turned and looked at me.

“What am I going to do?” she asked, a helpless plea that I didn’t have any answer for. I saw the moonlight catch and hang on the tears in her eyes. She blinked quickly and the shine was gone, leaving only the pain. “Michael, she’s crazy. She’ll hurt us. We have to do something.”

“What?”

Sylvia didn’t say anything, just started the car. I knew what she was thinking, and I remembered Adam’s cold-blooded assessment of risks and survival. I couldn’t do that. I hoped I never could.

“I’ll tell Adam,” she finally said as we pulled out on the street. I nodded absently, my attention already on the street behind us. Sure enough, a pair of headlights turned the corner and fell in behind us. I watched them for so long that Sylvia’s green eyes flew to the mirror and widened. “Shit! That’s her, isn’t it?”

“Probably”

“I don’t believe this.” Sylvia’s face settled into unforgiving lines of anger. “All right, if this bitch wants to play games, then we play. I’ll drop you and take her for a little ride.”

“I don’t like leaving you alone.” I frowned. Sylvia shrugged, and gave me a razor-edged smile that had little amusement in it.

“I can get rid of her. I have to. I can’t take her home. I need you to get home and tell Adam what happened, okay? I’ll drop you and be home in an hour.”

Sylvia turned down toward her house, then slowed and stopped at the curb in front of a bar decorated with strings of Christmas lights and sputtering neon. We exchanged one quick look, and then I got out and she pulled away. I turned and went into the bar, keeping my face to the shadows in case Foster had better night vision than she should have; she kept following Sylvia’s taillights. When she was gone, I pushed myself away from the wall and started walking.

I was about three blocks away from “home”—I couldn’t stand to think of it without the qualifying quotes—when I became convinced someone was watching me. I stopped dead in the dark abyss between streetlights, hidden under the fluttering leaves of an oak that fall hadn’t succeeded in stripping. There wasn’t any sound that shouldn’t have been there. Car engines, distant and close. The wind stirring the leaves and singing softly in the power lines. The rise and fall of conflicting TV programs from the houses down the block. There was a playground to my left, and the swings creaked arthritically as the wind pushed at them.

No. Not the wind. Someone sat on one of the swings, letting it move only a few short inches forward and back. He sat in the shadows where the moon couldn’t touch him, and he was so quiet …

Tooquiet. There was no sound of breathing, no pulsebeat.

“Adam,” murmured, knowing he could hear me. No reaction. I stepped out of the shadow of the leaves, and the creaking of the swing increased. “Damn it, Adam, quit screwing around. Sylvia’s in trouble.” The pendulum motion grew in slow inexorable stages, and he pushed off from the ground to drive the swing higher. Higher. The moonlight touched him at the upper limit of the pendulum—tangled dark hair, pallid triangular face, oddly huge eyes.

He was nobody I’d ever seen before. And he was a vampire.

He left the swing and landed lightly in front of me with only the slightest sound of impact, an impossible distance covered with the quick insectile grace of a jumping spider. Dear God, he was quiet. And fast. I took a step backward from him. He didn’t follow, just watched me with moonlit metallic eyes that were no particular color at all.

“I don’t know you,” he said, a low soft voice. It was all accent, that voice, a caricature of bayou drawl.Ah doont now yew.“You’re new. That’s real interesting. Adam finally got himself a whelp.”

Panicked instinct urged me to run, but there was something supremely predatory about the thing facing me, something old and deadly. I had the terrible conviction that if I turned I’d die. His moves were insectile and disjointed, as if he’d long ago ceased to function as anything like a human being, and yet there was grace and power in those awkward quick jerks. The eyes, too, were alien. Adam’s eyes had burned with life, even at their most terrifying. These—these eyes that watched me now were absolutely empty. I didn’t dare answer him, or make any move at all. There was a weird violence lurking just under the surface of his bayou drawl.

“New,” he repeated, drawing the word out derisively. He readied out, a blur of motion that ended with his fingertips lying cold on my cheek. “Well, now, how do you like the game?”

“Game?” I asked stupidly, but nothing really came out. I’d forgotten to fill the bellows of my lungs. He smiled, lips closed, but his eyes didn’t narrow. The two halves of his face moved independently.

“Death, boy. It’sfine.You’re in the game now, you know. And you’ll be a fine player.” Fa-a-ahn, he murmured, exaggerating the drawl like some parody of Andy Griffith. I wasn’t tempted to laugh. His fingers were like ice on my face, so cold they burned. “Tell Adam-boy I waited for him, and I’ll be back. He’ll be happy to hear that, I expect. And tell pretty ol’ Sylvia I’ve missed her.”

“Who are you?” I whispered, a scratch of air along vocal cords that seemed stricken with paralysis. His fingers moved down to my throat and suggestively cut across it, a quick slashing movement.

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